The rise of the underground free speech groups
Robin McDuff still lives in the same California town where she and other feminists formed a community back in the 1970s, during the heyday of the women’s movement. But by the end of the decade, McDuff had already begun to drift away from feminist orthodoxies. She’d been working in the anti-rape movement where victims said they wanted the man who assaulted them to understand the pain they caused, apologize and learn why never to do it again. They didn’t want them in jail. But most of McDuff’s feminist peers were fixated solely on incarceration as justice. “These women had no interest in considering any nuance of a case,” McDuff, now sixty-nine and retired, told me. “Nuance and feminism have never done well together.
